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Sunday, 21 October 2012

Brothers in arms

With an overcast and dull day ahead of us, and moderate winds and lumpy seas, we headed up to Lighthouse Point to make up for lost dive time over the last couple of weeks.

First order of business was to get out to the main wall and head right as it's not often we head that way due to the current but today it was in our favour.

A great day on the wall

The place was absolutely jumping with life and too many photo opportunities to ignore. These are the times when you need a rebreather to maximise your bottom time.

Ever friendly snappers happy to follow you around

Some lovely coral and sponge formations, not to mention some fantastic little swimthoughs loaded with silversides, tarpons and jacks which was surprising as it's not really the time of year for the silversides.

But never let it be said that we were prepared to look a gift tarpon in the mouth and we had a great time watching the big stuff darting in and out the clouds of silversides.Great fun.

Feeding frenzy!

Unfortunately the seahorses were particularly elusive today, but the place was infested with octopuses. Normally there's one or two hang out here but today I counted eight in total with two just a couple of metres away from the ladders.

The happy couple. Arm in arm, in arm, in arm, in arm.....

I lined up to take a little video clip of one particular octopus and he decided he wanted a shot of the camera for himself.

It wouldn't have been so bad but he didn't even bother to get a picture with me in it! Selfish little tyke.

There were also plenty of scrawled file fish hanging around at the mini wall along with a lot of tangs, sweetlips, squirrelfish and the occasional swarm of parrot fish eating their way along the hardpan.

File fish. Lots of them about about.

We also had a lovely little porcupine fish that adopted us for the duration of the dive as well. He was bombing around and wagging his little fins all over the place. If I'd thrown a stick, I'm pretty sure he would have fetched it!

Like a little puppy dog. Except not as noisy or smelly.

If you looked hard enough, there were quite a few bristle worms and lettuce leaf slugs to be found crawling across the sand as well as the obligatory flamingo tongue cowries and christmas tree worms.

Slugs a-hoy!

It must be said that Lighthouse Point is by far one of the best places to go shore diving on the island.

Christmas is coming. Soon time to decorate the trees.

The scenery is fantastic, you never quite know what you'll see on the day and it's so laid back, if you want to stay down for 150 minutes, that's absolutely fine as you won't get the staff hassling you to come back in so they can rush off down to the bar to get sh*t faced. It's that relaxed.